Every town or neighborhood has a number one restaurant.
Picture a line down the block, ridiculously long wait times to get a table and flustered wait staff who just want to get you in and out as quickly as possible. Doesn’t sound like the best customer experience, does it? But it doesn’t matter, because the food is that good—and you keep coming back for it, no matter what.
That’s the power of a fantastic product experience. Whether it’s food at a restaurant, or a software platform for an SaaS company, delivering an incredible product is the most important part of the customer experience. Not that we’re advocating for a poor customer experience in the other aspects of your business! We are just saying that how you execute the product experience (PX) is going to have the biggest impact on the overall customer experience (CX) for your company.
Which makes perfect sense when you think about it. Of all the ways that customers get an impression of your company, product is the only facet they interact with repeatedly, over a long period of time. Sales, marketing, and customer support are all important touchpoints, but they are fleeting. Think about the restaurant example; if customers love your product, then these other functions almost become a nice to have, rather than deal-making or -breaking.
And not only does a great product experience lead to a better overall customer experience, but it also has a bunch of other benefits. Obviously, it increases the probability of renewals and sustained recurring revenue. But it also makes them more receptive to new features, products, and services—upsells and expansions. If you have delivered value once, your customers will trust you to do it again.
The Difference Between PX and CX Metrics
A good PX strategy includes proactively announcing new features and upgrades, communicating about bugs, fixes, and maintenance, and gathering feedback through surveys, calls, chat, or emails. But perhaps the most important part of PX is gathering usage data from your customers. This customer data will help you understand how they are using the product, perform user mapping, and identify user segments.
To effectively use this customer data, you have to be able to translate it into meaningful metrics. PX metrics focus on the interaction between the customer and the product. This is somewhat different from more general CX metrics, which capture the relationship between the customer and the company as a whole. PX metrics can be seen as a subset of CX metrics. When trying to distinguish between PX and CX metrics, ask yourself, “Is there anything I can change about the product to improve this metric?” A “yes” would indicate you are dealing with a PX metric.
What Are Some Key PX Metrics to Measure?
PX data includes usage analytics and product feedback. Tracking the following metrics will help you improve your product experience.
Customer Effort Score (CES) How much effort a customer put in to accomplish a task within your product. This is usually measured using a survey.
Average Resolution Time How long it takes for a customer to overcome an issue that occurred while using the product. Again, this is usually measured via survey, but usage data can also indicate whether users are getting “stuck” on certain tasks.
Churn This metric measures how many customers leave your business. It should be measured over a period of time, ie, according to how long they were a customer before they left.
User Retention The percentage of customers who stay with your business. Usually, this is tracked per cohort, eg, how long all the customers who joined in May 2020 then stayed with the company.
Monthly or Daily Active Users How many users are active within the product. Changes to this metric over time let you know how popular the product is with customers.
How to Use Your Product Experience Metrics
Product experience metrics give you visibility into every step along the user journey. The data will be useful across the organization, including Product, Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, and others. So it is usually useful to analyze the PX metric data as a group.
PX data should be easy to manage and accessible to laymen, ie, non-data scientists. This enables anyone to make suggestions and requests to the Product team as they test new features and collect new types of data.
Having said that, Product needs to take the lead in managing the data, because interpreting it often requires a sophisticated knowledge of the product itself.
How Gainsight Can Help
Learn more about how Gainsight PX combines the power of rich PX metrics and contextual user engagements into a single platform. Sign up for a demo today!
